Thursday, May 24, 2018

Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, by Stephen Gowans

Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, by Stephen Gowans. Montreal: Baraka Books, 2018. Paper, $24.95, pp 270The following is a review of Gowans’ book byGregory ElichThe release of Stephen Gowans’s superb new book could not be better
timed. With the Korean Peninsula on the potential brink of major change,
looking to Western mainstream media for reasoned analysis is a fool’s
errand.

Gowans provides a valuable service in filling that gap by
situating Korea in its historical context, while making no compromise
with received opinion or resorting to lazy formulations.A key to understanding Korea is its experience under harsh colonial
rule by the Japanese Empire from 1910 through the end of the Second
World War. As was the case elsewhere, some of those under oppression
chose to serve power, and others resisted. While Imperial Japan shipped
off Koreans as forced laborers throughout its empire and cast women into
sexual slavery, a determined resistance movement arose, particularly in
Manchuria, where future North Korean leader Kim Il-sung was a prominent
guerrilla leader. Many of those who would later fill the ranks of the
South Korean government chose a different path, and actively
collaborated with the Japanese occupiers.After the end of the Second World War, the U.S. divided the Korean Peninsula along the 38th Parallel,
an act that Gowans points out the Korean people had not asked for.
Liberation from Japanese rule, Koreans felt, meant that the country was
once again theirs. People’s committees spontaneously sprang up
throughout the peninsula, as newly freed Koreans sought to forge their
destiny.The Soviet presence in the north was mostly hands-off, allowing events to unfold unhindered.

It was a different story in the south. U.S. General John R. Hodge, as
military governor of South Korea, along with his advisers “drew up a
four-point plan to destroy the movement for independence.”

The plan
called for building up an army and police force to be largely staffed at
upper levels by those who had collaborated with Japanese imperialism.Gowans quotes U.S. military sources as describing the Korean police
force under Japanese colonial rule as “thoroughly Japanized and
efficiently utilized as an instrument of tyranny,” which made these men a
natural choice for U.S. occupation authorities to perform the same role
in establishing an anti-communist police state.People’s committees
were systematically crushed, as tens of thousands of leftists were
killed or rounded up and imprisoned. For Koreans in the south, one
colonial master had simply been exchanged for another, as it was the
U.S. that called the shots.Traitors who had served the Japanese now
took orders from the Americans. “By 1950,” Gowans writes, “between
100,000 and 200,000 Korean patriots had been killed by U.S. occupation
forces and their Korean subalterns.”The division of the Korean Peninsula was intended to last no longer
than a relatively brief interregnum, but discussions between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union on establishing a provisional government went
nowhere.Soon the U.S. abandoned any pretense of respecting the
agreement on postwar Korea. “An ongoing U.S. presence on the Korean
Peninsula,” Gowans observes, “offered too many attractions to Washington
to leave Korea to Koreans.”The U.S. proceeded to build a separate
government by launching an election process in its occupation zone that
was boycotted by a majority.

Nevertheless, the U.S. pushed ahead.
“Koreans, after all, weren’t the object of the exercise,” Gowans
reports. “The building of a global U.S. empire was.” Voting in the south
was organized by a police force that was dominated by former Japanese
collaborators, along with right-wing thugs.Under the circumstances, the
outcome was preordained.The Soviet Union withdrew its forces on schedule from North Korea in
1948. Decades later, the U.S. military remains firmly ensconced in South
Korea, and showing no inclination of ever leaving.

The division of the Korean Peninsula, which most Koreans opposed and
few recognized, laid the groundwork for the Korean War. For Koreans, the
war was a brutal nightmare made far worse by the U.S. program of total
destruction and the aim of annihilating North Korea along with a
significant percentage of its population.South Korea endured long decades under right-wing dictatorship.
Gowans is eloquent in describing the harsh realities of life under
repression, and this section is one of the book’s many strengths.

Through continual struggle, the South Korean people eventually managed
to throw off the shackles of dictatorship, yet in many ways, the nation
remains subservient to the U.S. That liberation remains to be won.For more than a century the history of Korea has been a contest
between people’s needs and the demands of the powerful. Gowans places
Korea in the context of the global struggle for liberation from
imperialist domination, a perspective that sheds much light on
developments in recent decades.

The analytical framework and information provided by Gowans reveal
the basis for U.S.-North Korean animosity and depict a far more complex
picture of U.S.-South Korean relations than we customarily encounter.

It
is fair to say that if all one knows about Korea before coming to this
book is from mainstream news, then the reader will come away with a far
deeper understanding and appreciation of Korea’s fight for independence
and self-determination.Stephen Gowans is not a writer to mince words or to defer to
mainstream distortions. He makes no concessions to the standard
self-serving Western narrative, and this is one of the reasons his work
is so consistently refreshing. Gowans is also noted for his careful
research and masterly knack for deploying information in support of
logical analysis. Patriots, Traitors and Empires is no
different in those respects.His book is an impassioned call for
justice, imbued with a deeply felt sympathy for the Korean people and
their struggle for freedom.Patriots, Traitors and Empires can be ordered from Baraka Books:http://www.barakabooks.com/catalogue/patriots-traitors-and-empires/